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Cairo-based film marketing and distribution outfit Mad Solutions has acquired rights for Arab territories to three films that celebrated their premieres this year at the Cannes and Venice film festivals.

The deals include Fyzal Boulifa’s “The Damned Don’t Cry,” which bowed in the Venice Days sidebar at the Italian fest and will have its Middle East and North Africa premiere at Marrakech before traveling to Saudi Arabia’s Red Sea Film Festival. Also acquired was Rachid Hami’s “For My Country,” a Venice Horizons selection that will have its regional premiere at the Cairo Film Festival.

The company also picked up the rights to Clément Cogitore’s “Sons of Ramses,” which had its world premiere in the Cannes Film Festival’s Critics’ Week strand.

“We are delighted to have acquired the distribution rights to three artistically distinguished films in 2022, which is considered the climax of our efforts in...

Earlier this month, the Academy announced that 93 countries submitted films for its International Feature Film category at the 92nd Academy Awards. Ten of these came from Africa, a new record for the continent.

It remains to be seen whether any of these titles will be shortlisted in order to make the final list of five nominees. Of the 10 films, Senegal’s “Atlantics,” Mati Diop’s 2019 Cannes Grand Prix winner acquired by Netflix, probably has the strongest chance.

The last time a film representing an African country won this category was South Africa’s “Tsotsi,” by Gavin Hood, at the 78th Oscars in 2006. It’s one of just three wins from African countries, which also include Algeria’s “Z” by Costa-Gavras in 1969 and the Ivory Coast’s “Black and White in Color” (“La Victoire en chantant”) by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1976.

In 2018, eight submissions included African first-timers Mozambique (“The Train of Salt...

Expanded shortlist of 10 films to be announced on December 16.

The Academy on Monday (7) confirmed that 93 countries have submitted films for consideration in the international feature film category for the 92nd Academy Awards.

Ghana, Nigeria and Uzbekistan are first-time entrants with Kwabena Gyansah’s Azali, Genevieve Nnaji’s Lionheart, and Umid Khamdamov’s Hot Bread, respectively.

Earlier this year, the Academy board voted to rename the category formerly known as foreign language film, and expand the shortlist from nine to 10 films.

The shortlist will be announced on December 16. Nominations for the 92nd Oscars will be unveiled on January 13, 2020, and the Oscars...

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has released the full list of countries that have submitted a pic for consideration for the new International Feature Film Oscar category.

Here are the 93 nations and their hopefuls, in alphabetical order:

Albania, The Delegation, Bujar Alimani, director;

Algeria, Papicha, Mounia Meddour, director;

Argentina, Heroic Losers, Sebastián Borensztein, director;

Armenia, Lengthy Night, Edgar Baghdasaryan, director;

Australia, Buoyancy, Rodd Rathjen, director;

Austria, Joy, Sudabeh Mortezai, director;

Bangladesh, Alpha, Nasiruddin Yousuff, director;

Belarus, Debut, Anastasiya Miroshnichenko, director;

Belgium, Our Mothers, César Díaz, director;

Bolivia, I Miss You, Rodrigo Bellott, director;

Bosnia and Herzegovina, The Son, Ines Tanovic, director;

Brazil, Invisible Life, Karim Aïnouz, director;

Bulgaria, Ága, Milko Lazarov, director;

Cambodia, In the Life of Music, Caylee So, Sok Visal, directors;

Canada, Antigone, Sophie Deraspe, director;

Chile, Spider, Andrés Wood, director;

China, Ne Zha, Yu Yang, director;

Colombia, Monos, Alejandro Landes, director;

Costa Rica, The Awakening of the Ants,...

Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival has wrapped its second edition, with Singaporean director Yeo Slew Hua’s noir title “A Land Imagined” winning the Golden Star, the fest’s top prize, awarded by a jury headed by Oscar-winning Croatian producer Cedomir Kolar (“No Man’s Land”).

The genre pic, shot mostly at night, is about a jaded Singapore cop investigating the disappearance of a Chinese construction worker. It previously won the Locarno Film Festival’s Golden Leopard in August. The El Gouna award carries $50,000 in prize money, to be divided equally between the director and the main producer, Fran Borgia, and his Akanga Film Asia shingle.

Egyptian director A.B. Shawky’s unconventional road movie “Yomeddine” won Best Arab Narrative Feature award and split honors for the fest’s Cinema for Humanity audience prize with “Another Day of Life,” an animation-documentary hybrid about the experiences of war journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in 1970s Angola.

Winners in the narrative feature competition also included Ray & Liz, The Heiresses and Yomeddine.

Singaporean filmmaker Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined won the Golden Star in the Feature Narrative competition at the second edition of Egypt’s El Gouna Film Festival, which wrapped on Friday night.

The film, which recently won the Golden Leopard at this year’s Locarno film festival, follows a detective investigating the disappearance of a migrant worker.

Ray & Liz, directed by the UK’s Richard Billingham, won the Silver Star in the same competition, while the Bronze Star went to The Heiresses from Paraguay’s Marcelo Martinessi.

Amid the Arab world’s volatile festival landscape, Egypt’s ambitious El Gouna Film Festival, heading into its second edition, is aiming to raise its profile a few notches. The fest has secured the cream of this year’s global cinematic crop and more than doubled the cash prizes for Arabic projects at its co-production market.

Following the unexpected shuttering last December of the Dubai fest and market after 14 editions, El Gouna is certainly better positioned to play a prominent role as an Arab film industry driver and bridgehead into the Middle East for quality international films.

“The only selection criteria we have is that all films should be fresh Middle East premieres,” says Intishal Al Timimi, artistic director of the Sept. 20-28 event held in the El Gouna Red Sea resort and backed by Egyptian telecom billionaire Naguib Sawiris.

While world premieres are understandably scarce, this year El Gouna...

Festival will open with omnibus film Half The Sky from five female directors.

Mohamed Ben Attia’s Dear Son (pictured), Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined and The Man Who Surprised Everyone, from Natasha Merkulova and Aleksey Chupov, are among the films selected for the Crouching Tigers section of this year’s Pingyao International Film Festival (Pyifff).

The section, dedicated to debut or second features from new talents, will also screen the world premiere of Hotel Imperio, from Portuguese director Ivo Ferreira (see full line-up below).

Meanwhile, the festival’s Hidden Dragons section, dedicated to “imaginative and original genre...

All three of the Arabic films in this article concern fathers and sons. The bonds of respect and the seeds of future relationships which men make are found in this primary relationship.Yomeddine, sweet, naive and satisfying, was written and directed by A.B. Shawky. Egypt’s official submission for the 2019 Oscars in the Foreign Language category, this film played very well to a huge and enthusiastic audience both here in El Gouna and in Cannes where it premiered.Bashay Rady Gamal) leaving the leper colony with his beloved donkey is followed by his young orphaned friend, The Nubian, Obama,.

You can — and should — bring children to see this film. The best was watching this film with children here in El Gouna where it screened in a sold-out open-air theater of 1,200 seats with a desert breeze moving the scenes of huge landscapes in waves as if they were planned visual effects.

Two Italian films, both winners in Cannes Competition, each deal with dogs (or wolves) and their beloved beauty in societies doomed to dishonoring men by the very men who created them.

Acclaimed by the audience in its premiere red carpet screening, Dogman by Matteo Garroni is less explicit than Gemorrah in its condemnation of men and their societies, but it allows the innocence of one man to lie unheeded even though it is the instrument of cleansing the village of its villain. Marcello Fonte, who won for Best Actor, has a loving innocence which is matched by that of Lazzaro played by Adriano Tardiolo.

In Alice Rohrwacher’s Best Screenplay winner, Happy as Lazzaro, the protagonist — whose never complaining devotion allows him always to be happy to do the bidding of the village — works “like a dog” for no recompense except for a pat on the head; he is redeemed...

Directed by Mohamed Ben AttiaBy the director of ‘Hedi’, ‘Weldi’ or ‘Dear Son’ is really about suppression, especially on a psychosocial scale. The protagonist, happiest as a worker among men and with his one closest friend, a liberated working woman who is totally preoccupied with sexuality; is not even attentive enough to his exhausted wife to give her a rose to show his love. Only his son means the world to him and his wife and in the end is the only “thing” shared between them.

As his woman friend says, the son too could use a good schtup, and so, he, beguiled if not seduced, suddenly and without any premonition of what is to happen, runs off to Syria where he sires a child. His father abandons his wife to go in search of his son, in spite of his wife’s pleas to stay with her and not...

We do not live in subtle times, and of all nuance-annihilating topics, few are as dramatically divisive as jihadism. Which makes Mohammed Ben Attia’s delicate portrait of devastation, “Dear Son,” remarkable for the quietness of its approach, its rich, calm, generous characterizations, and the compassion it evokes for extremism’s more indirect victims. After his award-winning 2016 debut “Hedi,” which was, like “Dear Son,” co-produced by the Dardenne brothers, Ben Attia has confirmed himself as an unassuming auteur of ordinary life in Tunisia, in which global, block-capital concerns are writ in intimate, personal cursive.

The film is both anchored and elevated by a performance of simple, radiant decency from Mohamed Dhrif, an actor whose few credits mostly date back to the 1980s. He plays Riadh, a Tunisian dock worker married to Nazli who is the pragmatic foil to Riadh’s slightly impractical optimism. Their son, Sami (Zakaria Ben Ayed) is...